Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

(Karma, Wilde)

Bird day down here at the dailies. We got scrappy paintings of birds and polished paintings of birds. Birds on blue backgrounds and sticks in the ether. Foliage and naturalism and big ole pizza pie eyes. Painters that couldn't be more different or same. Both rupturing a full connection with their aviary in the warble glass of their eye - painting - a scrappy Craven brushwork or Rabus slight doubled eye surrealism. A crack in the glass that is style, the rupture that prevents full connection to our nature's plumage, a gap to throw our guesses at meaning, the gap is value not the meaning. So they're not just birds, art birds.

Ann Craven at Center for Maine Contemporary Art

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A disposability, amassment, like pages in diary, sketches in a notebook, kleenexes to breeze, dust to the wind. Cheapness enhances their temporality; it tarnishes quickly to any glare that won't care for it. They come pre-wounded as chintz.

Ann Craven at KARMA

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Unsure what means, finding Craven's paintings almost pleasant now after so many years thinking their abominableness was surely the point. Is this Stockholm syndrome, or has Painting simply filled with her derivatives making Craven's appear buoyant, floating on her lineage. Even what had seemed so saccharine, seems now somehow tastefully polite. Or a literal process of desensitization, Craven's endlessly repeated imagery eventually producing "diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative, aversive or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it."  You can learn to feel a coping apathy toward any repeated stimulus, called "learned helplessness in rats."

see too: Ann Craven at Southard Reid, Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Ann Craven at Southard Reid

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Suppose a sci-fi alternate history, post-war painting replaced with this. Ann Craven, Lily van der Stokker, Judith Bernstein, Nicola Tyson, cuteness of content, rather than flatness with swagger. Clementine Greenberg. Everyone really having said fuck the Bauhaus and everything was fluorescent and green. Not sure what difference can really be ascertained between Craven and Rothko really, besides the surrounding culture? What would have been the world then? Would Lisa Frank still be cool?

See too: Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton,  Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

Ann Craven at Confort Moderne



The Naumanian premise “I am a painter, therefore I paint.” and any second-guess-skepticism ceded to the viewer, while painter’s axiom leaves artists whittling unfazed, Irony tempered by luxury fordist production. Surely if one cares to paint the moon this many times, one cares. The clock critiqued with a On Kawara style of deliberation, accumulation, a stickler’s dedication Laura Owens renounced.
The non-object of its subject, Bambis and the like; like so much contemporary work, displacing meaning, surely it is not here, and we look everywhere and find it nowhere, but in Man’s search for meaning in whichever camps, Frankl’s or John Waters, black satin and- are those cat food tins glued to the painting?